Libyan rebels storm seat of Gadhafi's power

TRIPOLI, Libya - Jubilant rebel fighters overran the seat of power of the fugitive Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Tuesday, swarming into his fortified Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli and heralding the symbolic end of his four-decade rule.

Gadhafi's whereabouts were unknown, and loyalist forces continued to put up stiff resistance in scattered areas around the capital. As night fell, his fighters unleashed volleys of artillery onto the city and battles raged near the airport, muting the celebratory mood and sending some revelers rushing indoors for cover.

At least two major towns as well as numerous smaller ones remained under Gadhafi's control, and it is clear that more fighting lies ahead before the rebels can claim the whole country.

Hours after the battle erupted, a pro-Gadhafi TV channel quoted the Libyan leader as saying he retreated from his Tripoli compound in a "tactical move" after 64 NATO airstrikes turned it to rubble. Al-Rai TV said it would air the comments in full and reported an excerpt in which Gadhafi vowed his forces would resist "the aggression with all strength" until either victory or death.

But with the breaching of the compound from which Gadhafi ruled unchallenged for most of the past 42 years, his stewardship of Libya seemed to be over, making him the third dictator to be toppled since Arabs across the region began to rise up against their rulers in January.

This was also the first outright regime change of the Arab Spring. Though uprisings forced Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down, their regimes remained largely intact, with military leaders from the old order stepping in to oversee the transition to a still-undefined new one.

Never before has the Arab world witnessed a rebel army overrun a ruler's home and power base in scenes that unfolded live on TV, eventually on multiple channels but first on al- Jazeera, which has played an iconic role throughout the Arab revolts.

Footage showed rebel fighters waving from the shell of the house bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986, which Gadhafi had preserved as a monument to his own survival, and clambering onto the bronze statue of Gadhafi's fist clutching an F-16 fighter jet that was erected to commemorate the attack.

Abdel-Aziz Shafiya, a 19-year-old rebel dressed in camouflage with a rocket-propelled grenade slung over one shoulder and a Kalashnikov over the other, said the rebels believed Gadhafi was inside the compound but hiding underground.

"Wasn't he the one who called us rats? Now he is the rat underground," he said.

The rebels also swarmed through the extensive grounds where Gadhafi until recently had kept camels and where his supporters gathered throughout the NATO bombing campaign to serve as human shields for their leader.

Nearby, concerns were growing for the safety of journalists still trapped under fire at the Rixos Hotel.

The Gadhafi compound was undeniably his power base, relatively modest by the standards of most Arab leaders but bursting with the eccentricities that characterized his rule. The tent in which he received visiting dignitaries was erected on the lawn. He delivered his first defiant speech of the uprising from the bombed house, and state TV regularly broadcast footage of him driving himself through the grounds in his golf cart.

The spectacle will give pause to other Arab leaders still hoping to withstand the clamor for change that has swept the region, notably Syria's President Bashar Assad, whose brutality rivals that of Gadhafi's and who has deployed tanks and troops in an attempt to crush a five-month revolt by unarmed protesters against his rule.

But in Libya, attention was already switching to the post-Gadhafi era and the urgent need to establish a new administration to replace the one in flight.

"We have to now begin for the transitional period immediately," Mahmoud Jibril, the chairman of the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, the de facto rebel government, said at a news conference in the Qatari capital, Doha. He said preparations were under way to set up a security council that would gather together rebels from their three main locations.

Meanwhile, key ministers of the Transitional National Council left Benghazi late Tuesday and headed to the town of Zintan, about 100 miles southwest of Tripoli, to establish a first toehold for the eastern-based rebel leadership in the western part of the country, according to Suleiman Foutiya, a council member in Benghazi.

Rebels were also making rapid progress along the coastal highway in the east, breaking out from Brega, the town they seized Monday, according to a rebel army spokesman, Col. Ahmed Bani.

Gadhafi's forces were in full retreat, he said, toward Sirte, a heavily guarded bastion that could present the rebels with their biggest military challenge yet.

Bani said, however, that tribal leaders there had reached out to the opposition for a truce and that another Gadhafi stronghold, the desert town of Sabha in the south, had risen up. The claims could not be confirmed.

A NATO official who was not authorized to speak publicly said surveillance imagery offered no indications that Gadhafi supporters were massing anywhere for a major new offensive. Though firefights continue in some areas, "we're not seeing large military formations of the kind that were guarding key points, which suggests that we're getting pretty close to the end," he said.

"It's just a question of time for the opposition to take full control of all the major parts of Tripoli."